As an artist you're on a journey of discovery and sometimes that journey takes a long time, doesn't subscribe to [a] train schedule, to the punch-clock. And I need to read a lot to make my pages happen.

Used to be in the old days, only the pulp writers wrote like machines. Now everybody is expected to be literary John Henrys. So in that context someone like me is an anomaly.

Know that in this world there's somebody who will always love you.

You whispered my full name and we fell asleep in each other's arms and I remember how the next morning you were gone, completely gone, and nothing in my bed or the house could have proven otherwise.

...and when he thought about the way she laughed, as though she owned the air around her, his heart thundered inside his chest, a lonely rada.

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

I think that most of us are aware that as writers we are seeking absences, we're seeking silences, we're seeking spaces that people haven't entered. No writer is saying, "Hey, I want to go to this very well trod territory and say exactly what someone else has done." I think the nature of a writer, because we are attempting to bring to light areas that people haven't seen before, tends in some ways to be progressive, at least in that light.